How to Fold a T-Shirt
by mholub00
Summary: She folds herself into Natasha as if she were a t-shirt that had finally been washed clean. (4 Parts)
1. Step 1

_Step 1: Lay shirt out on its front and smooth any wrinkles._

He meets Natalia Romanova, the real Natalia Romanova, in a padded cell three feet below the ground. She's much different here, drowning in white, than the eighteen year old girl who tried to shoot him point blank while fire burned like a halo and her blood created an ocean. Despite the fighting and screaming, the attitude of the frightened child she's finally allowed to be, every time he looks at her, at the red hair hanging in shambles around a face that's heavy with the world and at the eyes that have lost their soul, he shivers at the thought that she is the most basic reflection of himself he will ever see: he hates it, and he isn't sure if it makes him want to destroy her or destroy himself.

No, he decides, it makes him want to make her better. It makes him want to make her succeed everywhere he couldn't, everywhere he failed. It makes him want to make her let go of the monster she's been taught to be.

They let her out after six months, after the hallucinations have stopped, after she can remember her own name for a week in a row, after they've rewired her mind to rewire the rewiring that's had her twisted in its grasp since she was five years old.

_Step 1: Expose the worst._


	2. Step 2

_Step 2: Take one sleeve and fold it inward along the shoulder line._

She learns quickly at SHIELD. He watches her take to the rules, take to the "status quo" of the people who claim they're above it. She trains by herself, eats lunch alone, and walks with her head down. She can clear a room simply by entering, and everyone whispers to her back: she pretends she can't hear them, but she can; she always can.

It makes him want to tear his hair out, maybe blow something up, and he doesn't understand how she can live it when he can't even stand on the sidelines and watch. This young woman, this child, deserves the respect of every operative ten times over, for what she spent her life going through.

He figures it out after a while, the key piece of the puzzle he's over looked, and it's the fear that flickers through the eyes of the agents the moment they're in her presence. It's the fear that forces her to the shadows, the fear that keeps her silent. Where he sees everything she is, the others see only the Black Widow: an unstable assassin with a questionable past. She is an enigma they can't understand because they are blinded.

The first time someone speaks to her (he's watching from across the mess hall, just as he always is), Phil Coulson sits down opposite her and asks how she's been. He calls her Agent Romanoff, and she almost smiles.

The Black Widow is who she was, but Agent Romanoff is who she is now.

_Step 2: Fold the past behind you._


	3. Step 3

_Step 3:_ _Take the opposite sleeve and fold it in the same way, on top of the other one._

The other agents expect her to be unpredictable and violent, and she kills punching bags with enough ferocity that they couldn't possibly be wrong. They've watched her at the shooting range, watched her hit every vital organ on the target dummy with her eyes closed, and the first time she sparred with the instructor, he was sent to Medical with a broken wrist and possible rib fracture.

They think she's dangerous; he finds her intriguing, and he wishes he could tell her so, but he's not allowed to see her yet.

At night, he knows she sneaks down to the training facilities because he's already there- there's a spot in the rafters that's good for thinking, and he finds himself sitting in the dark quite often.

At night, she's quieter than a mouse and she moves practice dummies around to her liking, hiding them around the gym as if she was in a cityscape, as if she was their target. She starts with her eyes closed, with a deep breath, her hands around a gun that looks suspiciously Russian and definitely custom made, and then she's gone in a flash of red hair, as if the space she once stood never held a body at all.

She flips and rolls and jumps ridiculous distances from ridiculous heights. She decapitates one man and shoots another through the head, the silencer on her glock leaving her nothing more than a whisper. The dummies fall one by one, and often he loses track of where she is.

It's amazing, what she can do, and he wonders what the others would say if they watched this, watched her perform without holding anything back for their sake.

Sometimes, when the bodies are strewn around her, she'll lie on the mats to catch her breath, looking up at the ceiling, and she'll laugh.

It's the most beautiful sound he's not supposed to hear.

_Step 3: Hide your personality._


	4. Step 4

_Step 4: Fold the shirt in half, bringing the bottom corners to the neckline, before turning the whole thing over to admire your work._

His fifty-fourth mission for SHIELD is going to become her first, and he keeps the small amount of excitement buried deep inside. Fury's method of punishment for not putting an arrow through her heart feels an awful lot like reward: pairing his best operative with his best asset could either end in disaster, or something beyond what he could have hoped for and Fury is definitely pulling for the latter.

She's already in the briefing room when he walks in, the black chair making her look smaller than she already is, and she's tracing concentric circles on the table top. She doesn't look up until he sits down across from her, and even then it's barely a look before she's back to pretending he isn't there.

They still have time before Coulson and Fury and Hill show up to ruin the mood, so after a few seconds of watching her, watching the girl he's decided is going to be his best work, his prodigy, everything he never was, he leans back in his chair and sets his feet down on the clean surface, he's worn and slightly dirty boots dropping small amounts of dirt on the table's shine. This gets her attention and she looks up for longer now, meeting his eyes.

"I'm-" he starts to introduce himself, but she cuts him off almost immediately.

"Agent Barton, I know," she says quietly. "You brought me here. I remember."

She suppresses a shiver at the thoughts of _before_, of the gun shots and fire and taking his hand, and goes back to tracing circles.

"My name is actually Inigo Montoya," he continues, talking mostly to himself. "You killed my father. Prepare to die."

For a second she freezes, and he's slightly afraid she's taking him seriously, that she doesn't get the reference, until she lets a small smile creep onto her lips and looks up at him again.

"You can call me Agent Barton if you want, but my name is Clint," he says, extending a hand across the table.

She looks at him for another second, her eyes searching his face, before taking his calloused hand in her own and appeasing his request for a handshake. "Natasha Romanoff."

The name slips off her tongue like she's never been called anything else.

_Step 4: Become what you want them to see._


End file.
